What a farcical waste, all that egg on the face

JJardine’s funders could do the country a favour by not switching off the taps now that their man has left the table

ust before Christmas I was taking a coffee in a Cape seaside village when an old friend walked past, a distinct spring in her step. I asked how she was. “I’m fine,” she said, “just off to lunch. I’m going to tell them all about my new political home.” I asked which one.

“Roger Jardine,” she said. “Change Starts Now! It’ sa movement you know ...” And then she was off.

Former First Rand chair Jardine had just days earlier launched his party, or movement, or whatever. The launch was a dreary mush of worthy speakers, in my view then and, I wrote, a disaster in the making. And it was. On Thursday Jardine pulled out of the May 29 elections, muttering obliquely about “unfair” registration rules for small parties.

But not before a lot of earnest middle-class folk had climbed aboard. What were they thinking?

Jardine was not the white business candidate as often reported. He was funded by a handful of wealthy individuals. But why did these funders throw money at a new party before a long holiday period and just five months out from an election? What were they thinking?

It is hard to say, but they’ll be wiping the egg off today. For the most part, the funders are traditional DA supporters frustrated with the way the party has lost black support and, with it, any real chance of challenging the ANC. DA leadership is whiter than it has been for years. Jardine’s funders thought they could somehow get him close to, if not into, the DA and that he might emerge as a leader of the DAinspired multiparty charter (MPC).

But the funders made a rookie error — they confused the principles and policies they want to see in government with the actual act of getting elected in the first place. And they chose a most unsuited candidate. Jardine has no political future on his own.

Electoral politics are brutal. The only measure of success is winning or getting more votes than last time. You promise the world (they all do) and more if you must. And if for the DA 2024 means being labelled reactionary or racist it doesn’t matter. Helen

Zille and John

Steenhuisen have got thick political hides.

They are not moved.

Under leader Mmusi

Maimane in the 2019 elections the DA vote slumped from 22.23% in 2014 to 20.77%. He was fired after the 2019 results showed voters had shifted away to the FF+. But for any party, holding your core voters is Elections 101 and the DA in this election is going all out to get its people back. It won’t do as well as it thinks, nor as badly as some of the polling suggests. But it must have been clear from the moment Jardine began to speak that he was much closer to the ANC right than the DA left.

So that’s what, R50m, R80m down the drain? The DA could have used the money. Rise Mzanzi’s Songezo Zibi, arguably the most strategically and intellectually gifted party leader in the country today, could have done with the money. Where Jardine folded in the face of the sheer weight of electoral compliance despite his money, Zibi has slowly and conscientiously built up a functioning political machine, registered and paid up to contest, with a fraction of Jardine’s funding.

But when he first knocked on the funders’ doors they turned him away. Not a leader, they all said. What rubbish. I’ve learnt my lesson and I won’t embarrass Zibi by endorsing him. But anyone who thinks there is a purely liberal, free markets and redress-free end to South Africa’s ultimate liberation is a fool.

The end, when we reach it, will be a nuanced version of freedom where individual enterprise is valued, foreign investment welcomed, economic transformation measurably improves life for workers and the poor, the weak and the vulnerable are protected and corruption and waste punished. It’ll be a social democracy, light years from the fetid, grabbing and disgraceful racial nationalism we suffer now. The ANC was born of apartheid and is its last real remnant. It is part of the beast that gave it birth, not an alternative to it.

Jardine’s funders could do the country a favour by not switching off the taps now that their man has left the table. There is still time. Help parties like Rise Mzansi, the DA even, Inkatha, ActionSA to get to the voters they’re targeting. And then wait for the results and see what can be done to break the tenure of the weak, insecure liars and ideological dinosaurs that still have carte blanche here.